Julie Hemment is truly an international citizen.  Born and raised in England, as a teen Hemment went on a non-profit “Project Trust” mission to Kenya, where she taught English literature. (Hemment’s mother joined the Voluntary Service Overseas--or VSO, the English equivalent of the Peace Corps--when she retired, spending 2 years in Namibia, so perhaps it’s in the genes). Hemment eventually came to the U.S. for her doctoral studies at Cornell University.  Currently, Hemment is an associate professor of anthropology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, specializing in post-Soviet Russia.  Hemment, author of the critically well-received Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs, has visited Russia for over 20 years, where she engages in forms of participatory research.   Hemment was in Russia during the collapse of the Soviet government.  I talked to her about that experience, and the connection between those early post-Soviet days and the recent political protests in Russia:

BV: What first attracted you to Russia?

JH: Well, it was kind of this weird serendipitous moment; in part from the experience of living overseas in Kenya (which was a great experience, but in retrospect was of course a bit imperialistic), in my youthful exuberance I got the travel bug. Around that time, I happened to make the acquaintance of Russians visiting the U.K.  This was during Perestroika, and I came of age in the gloom of Thatcher’s Britain.  So I struck up a friendship with a visiting Russian.  I just got caught up in the stories of change, and the intoxicating sense of possibility Russia represented.  And I was also drawn to the Russian style of narration and storytelling.  And of course, there was the transgressive appeal of going to the other side of the “iron curtain.”
I was in Russia while huge world events were taking place: I was there when the Berlin Wall came down; I lived there when the Soviet government collapsed. So I found the world shifting under my feet. And I became aware of these cultural dynamics and expectations of what “freedom” represented; and, as part of that, what I represented there as a Westerner.  There was this sense of idealism and possibility at that time.  I became interested in what it was that people thought they were going to get from these profound changes.  Around this time, “How-to” books flooded the Russian marketplace, mostly written by U.S. authors; you know, how to be your entrepreneurial self, etc.  So I was very interested in the question of what was this thing that people thought they wanted and were going to become? The main thing that got me hooked was the kind of solutions that were being imported.

BV:  What kinds of projects have you been involved with during your trips to Russia?

JH: The piece that fascinated me about the newly post-Soviet Russia was the arrival of NGOs (non-governmental organizations), which brought with them the notion of citizen empowerment.   The first project I got involved with was a new feminist-oriented women’s group in a small city.  This organization was forging connections with Western feminism; and it was an unusual and rarified move at the time, after the fall of the Soviet Union.  Only small numbers of people were really doing anything like this at the time; there was a kind of allergy to mass political organizations after the demise of the Communist party-run government.  These were anomalous people who chose to come together and organize in this way.  And women’s rights organizing was a project with a Bolshevik taint, so it was rejected by most people in the new Russia.

BV: What is the state of the Left or progressive politics in Russia these days?

JH: Well, in the immediate aftermath of the state’s collapse, any Left vocabulary became impossible.  Social justice issues were seen as something from the past, and discredited utterly. The word “communist” had come to be used as a kind of epithet for people who were hopelessly stuck in the past.  I was disconcerted at this time, along with some other Russians I knew, at what was almost an embrace of social inequality, as if this were the natural order.  It remains very difficult to talk about the “Left” and “Right”:  these things don’t map easily onto the Russian context.  Now Putin of course rode the 1990s wave of the national rejection of neo-liberalism, presenting himself as a populist.  So this was a kind of flip in the political landscape, but was not really a renaissance for the Left.  The Communist party is still the most organized party in Russia, but it now works in concert with the Putin government as the so-called “loyal opposition.”  Nowadays, there are more Left, radical organizations, but they’re very diffuse and marginal.
BV: It’s tempting to see the recent popular protests in Russia as part of a global continuum of activism, from the “Arab Spring,” through the Occupy movement, etc.  Is it appropriate to consider Russian activism in this vein?